Slashdot Mirror

My view is that Python is an imperative language that is moving towards functional programming - much like both Ruby and JavaScript it's never going to get there, but it's a definite shift from when I started coding it at version 1.5, and IMO it's much cleaner to consider code as a series of transforms of varying kinds than a grab bag of tools.

I suspect switch lost out due to the C-style switch-with-fallthrough and "clever" shenanigans like Duff's Device that can make them anything but obvious what's going on, and back in 1991 avoiding that probably looked like a good idea for an easy to learn language. I once worked on an application that's core consisted of a 3,000 line switch statement for handling messages, with both fall-through all over the place, and parts of it callled back into itself in what may have been an attempt at code re-use, but was probably just as stupid as it looked... *shudder*

I like Coffeescript's switch, but that's partly because I like having every construct being an expression, removing an element of the code/data divide.

I'm an old timer, but all of the cool kids that I know are using CoffeeScript http://coffeescript.org./
It's just an extension of Javascript and it compiles into ordinary Javascript.
It fixes most of the weird "broken" syntax of Javascript -- making it much more similar to Python (a better learning language -- if you could install it).

Best of all -- it runs in the browser -- hit the "Try CoffeeScript" tab in at coffeescript.org.

GMail, and much of Google's stuff is written with GWT, which is a platform for developing the client-side of web applications that compiles Java code into JS. You can't really make a modern web app with Java and run it as java (you know, through a JRE, unless someone makes a JRE in the browser, and lol @ that), but you can cross-compile. GWT is like Coffeescript on steroids with a framework behind it as well. These meta-compilation schemes are becoming more and more popular. Look at Facebook, they write their website in PHP and compile it to C++ for efficiency with Hiphop. Google's Traceur compiles code from ES5+ down to ES3 so you can write code with advanced ES5 features on modern browsers that still only have ES3 support.

It is still pretty common to write Java back-ends (primarily on Tomcat and a few other major players), but that's becoming less and less common in newer more modern web apps. I have no citation for this outside of my own observations, and I surely haven't seen everything so I might just be horribly wrong.

it seems now everything has to be JavaScript-based...

I agree with you about Python; I think that for learning, Python is the best. Not JavaScript.

But if someone did want to learn to program using just web-based stuff, maybe CoffeeScript would be a good choice; I have heard very positive things about it here on Slashdot.

http://coffeescript.org/

steveha

I suggest you look at CoffeeScript. It is a compiles to JS, but cleans up a lot of the difficult syntax.

Exactly my thought when I read the last line:

Note that you'll need Chromium to run the demos.

. Now, a new language that doesn't have the heavy weight backing of Google (but maybe that's a good thing) is CoffeeScript.

Thanks for the review. The book is aimed mainly at the many developers for whom JavaScript is a secondary language, something they just use to add a little pizzazz to their web pages with jQuery. That's why much of the book is devoted to explaining how scope works, what "this" means, and how prototypal inheritance works—because once you understand the underlying JavaScript, CoffeeScript really is a very simple language. I know you would have preferred a more substantial CoffeeScript book, but there already is a good comprehensive reference: The official site at http://coffeescript.org/ It offers examples of nearly every one of the language's features. If you're fluent in JavaScript, that's probably all you need to get up and running with CoffeeScript. If not, then I hope this book will help. An updated ebook release will be available shortly to address the errata you mentioned. And I'm currently working on a more advanced screencast series, which I hope you'll check out.